Happy holidays, Merry Christmas

This week’s news is a bit late, but it’s packed full of good stuff for you to read over the next week. Have a good time, and go smash some Christmas lights (just virtually, of course).

Apple iAd brings new life to PastryKit

Normally I wouldn’t be so excited about a new technology to deliver ads, but a reader on my developer blog pointed out that Apple’s internal mobile JavaScript framework PastryKit seemed to be the predecessor to the new iAd JS (Apple developer login required). This seems to be a correct assumption, as the new iPhone user guide (view with an iPhone user agent) now uses iAd JS as its core JavaScript framework (it previously used PastryKit). That’s quite interesting, considering the iPhone user guide doesn’t deliver ads!

What’s even more telling is that many old PastryKit method names map directly onto the new iAd namespace:

PKUtils becomes ADUtils

PKObject becomes ADObject

PKSize becomes ADSize

PKNavigationView becomes ADNavigationView

PKView becomes ADView

PKScrollView becomes ADScrollView

etc…

This is quite exciting, especially now that we have official documentation! However, it’s unclear if third party developers will be able to use iAd for non-ad applications, as Apple seems to have done with their own iPhone user guide.

Game engines

There’s been an explosion of new JavaScript game engines being released!

CraftyJS is a lightweight JavaScript game engine with some demos that aren’t particularly impressive on their own, but pretty good considering the library hasn’t been around too long. What seems to be more impressive here is the terseness of the code.

jgen is a new game engine that comes with a pretty nifty map editor right of out of the box.

Google Body Browser

Body Browser is a stunning new Google Labs product that harnesses the power of WebGL and Canvas to bring a 3D interactive model of the body straight to the browser. Because it depends on WebGL, it means this demo will only work with Chrome, Safari (running on Snow Leopard), or Firefox 4.